More than 154,000 websites contain the phrase, “It’s so gay,” according to www.thinkb4youspeak.com.

And you can’t walk the campus without hearing it dozens of times 

In fact, “that’s so gay” used to be my favorite expression. And I said it a lot.  

It could be my response to the movie starting late or a book not being available. Just about anything at all really.

But that all changed during high school.

Freshmen year, a teacher constantly corrected me, telling me and the class it was wrong.

But I didn’t care or even listen until one of my closest friends revealed he was gay during my sophomore year.

I was happy for him, but when I told some friends they just looked at me in surprise.  

“Well,” one said, “I always thought you were kind of a homophobe.”

That really hit me.

I had said “that’s so gay” so often, people assumed I had a problem with gay people.

At first, I shrugged it off, thinking, my newly “out” gay friend would tell me, if I was really offending people.

But he never said anything about the subject.

Finally, I did some research, only to discover that millions of gay teenagers won’t say the phrase is offensive. They keep quiet, sometimes even stopping going to school when it gets so bad.

Right then and there, I swore I would never use that phrase again. But surprisingly, it wasn’t easy, and more often than I’d like to admit, teachers still had to correct me.

What finally made the difference was my friend telling me how he had been harassed at school for being gay. No one physically harmed him. They hurt him with their words. I didn’t want to be one of those people.

“That’s so gay “means something is “lame,” “stupid,” “dumb,” “wrong.” Basically, we’re telling gay people their lifestyle is “lame,” “stupid,” “dumb,” “wrong.”

Just the other day, I had an instant messenger conversation with a friend during which he constantly used the phrase. I corrected him every time he referred to something as “gay.” But each time I substituted the word “lame,” he responded as if I’d just agreed with him.

Finally, I just told him to stop equating “gay” with “lame.”

“It actually offends people,” I wrote. “It’s not like ‘lame’ is that much harder to type?”

He seemed to agree, although I don’t know whether “it’s so gay” will disappear from his future conversations.

Still, it’s worth the effort. I didn’t change overnight either.